I’m finishing up a great book that I would highly recommend for anyone involved in teaching and learning: Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement by Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane Pollock. In it, the authors go through nine instructional strategies that are backed by research demonstrating their efficacy and provide pithy, easy-to-understand classroom examples for using them.
At the end of the book, there is a chapter that talks about how these strategies can be applied to different types of knowledge. There is a section on vocabulary that is particularly interesting to me, especially in light of the dictionary we are developing.
First, the authors say, there is not a lot of explicit instruction in vocabulary in schools, largely because of the large number of words to be learned (85,000 print academic words — need to find out more about this figure; does it include multiple forms of the same words?) and the small number that can be explicitly taught (10-12 per week). Instead, most schools have opted to emphasize extensive reading and learning words in context. The authors make a compelling case, though, that this is not always an effective way to learn new vocabulary.
The authors make these key points:
- “Students must encounter words in context more than once to learn them.” (In fact, an average of 6 times.)
- “Instruction in new words enhances learning those words in context.” (Even giving students a very superficial exposure to words before seeing them in context is apparently immensely helpful.)
- “One of the best ways to learn a new word is to associate an image with it.” (This is an idea that has permeated mainstream education in the U.S. Many teachers have embraced the idea of having students draw pictures they associate with words. The research is that nonlinguistic representations are much more effective than sentence writing, which is how I always was taught vocabulary. I’m curious on research about student-generated vs. teacher/publisher-supplied visuals.)
- “Direct vocabulary instruction works.”
- “Direct instruction on words that are critical to new content produces the most powerful learning.” (This seemed obvious to me, but bears emphasis I suppose.)
Very interesting information. It makes me think of all kinds of new ways to use the open dictionary.